Google Apps is a useful service by Google which allows businesses and organizations with their own domain to use google service such as google mail, calendar, and start page. I spent a couple minutes moving Gearfire’s email accounts over to google, because I much prefer the gmail interface and storage over the generic-feeling webmail that comes from my host.

I was relaxing one night, and overheard my mom complaining to my dad about how their email address from the local ISP was not receiving messages properly, and had a 4MB attachment limit. So for my dad’s birthday, I registered a domain name for our family, and opened a Google Apps account with it. The advantages of gmail over the ISP’s email were enormous.

- Web interface to check email on the go
- 10MB file attachments
- Really good spam filtering
- Ability to check filtered spam to check for accidentally flagged messages
- Archiving of emails, so you never have to worry about a local system crash
- Easy search allows you to search your emails faster than a local folder hierarchy
- Personalized @domain.com address looks much better than @ISP.com
- You can choose any name @yourdomain and be sure it isn’t taken yet!

I pondered the possibility of everyone using Google Calendar, and sharing calendars with each other, but I don’t think my family is THAT open to embracing new technology yet. My mom doesn’t understand digital calendars, and my dad wouldn’t leave outlook for his life.

Now my current challenge is to get them using Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express…

Google Apps

I saw an interesting company called Myndology which sells disc-based notebook systems, similar to Rollabind or Circa. I emailed them and tried to get a free sample to review on Gearfire, but alas, I had to purchase my own notebooks. I guess I’m just not popular enough yet… anyways…

The disc-bound concept

Myndology is a company that sells disc notebook systems. For anyone who does not know what those are, you can check out the basic concept here. Basically disc notebooks allow you to easily remove, replace, re-organize, or even transfer pages between notebooks. This makes disc notebooks ideal for GTD, because you can easily remove pages to stick in your inbox. One of my peves about Moleskines are that you end up carrying around half a book of already-processed items, which is really a space waster. With Myndology notebooks, not only can you take out items to process, but you can re-arrange your projects, or contexts as often as you’d like.

So here’s the deal

Myndology is basically just a re-branded distributor of the European Atoma notebooks. Atoma uses discs that are similar to those of Rollabind, with the same spacing. However the discs are not identical, so putting Rollabind refills into a Myndology book will not produce the snuggest fit, and vice versa.

The Good Stuff

The notebooks are fairly priced, with a journal-sized system running at $6, and an index-card system at $3.50. My first impression after opening the package was “Wow, these are hot!”. The translucent colored covers along with the artsy designs make for a visually pleasing notebook. You could definitely walk into class with one of these beauties and get a bunch of compliments on your taste in notebooks. After taking a couple minutes to familiarize myself with the disc-based concept, I noticed the high-quality of the writing paper, which I have heard is much better than Rollabind’s paper.

But…

The only problem with Myndology is that they do not yet offer a paper punch for the Atoma holes. Thus, you cannot yet punch your own papers to put in your notebook. However I have heard that the Circa punches work fairly well, but personally I will wait for Atoma-specific punches.

The bottom line

Myndology creates a great line of high-quality, and visually appealing notebooks. The disc-bound system makes them ideal for students, because it doesn’t matter what notebook you are taking notes in, because you can just swap the pages later. I am very satisfied with my purchase, and I am eagerly awaiting Myndology to release a punch, and some other accessories such as dividiers, etc.

Myndology Website 

We’ve talked before about How to Read Feeds more Productively but what do you do when one of your favorite feeds starts posting too much? Well now you don’t have to go to the extreme of unsubscribing, and instead you can fix the problem.

I found myself in this position a couple days ago, with one of my favorite feeds: Download Squad. DS has very interesting articles, and I usually find a lot of cool apps from them. However they post 13 items per day, and lately many of those have become low-quality posts, which I do not want to read. So you can see my problem is that I do not want to wade through 7 posts I will not read to get to the 4-5 that I like.

Simple solution: Use AideRSS to filter your feeds.

AideRSS rates individual items in feeds based on the reaction in the blogosphere, such as Diggs, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati favorites, etc. The posts are rated on a scale of 1-10, but most fall into 1-7. You can then choose to receive only higher numbers into your feed reader. The idea is that if the post is worth reading, it will create a reaction and people will talk about it. For Download Squad, I subscribed to the “Great” filter, which sends me about 1/3 of their articles.

The only thing I am concerned about is whether AideRSS reports the number of subscribers to the original RSS source. Otherwise, it could hurt advertising revenue for that blog.

So if you find yourself surrounded with feeds that post too many items a day, but you don’t want to unsubscribe completely, try using AideRSS, so you only get the cream of the feed.

When it comes to browser homepages, I have slowly drifted from MSN to Google, to Netvibes, to Schoolr, to Sputtr and then back to Google. My latest (and quite possibly greatest) startpage is Only2Clicks.

Only2Clicks is very unique, and I don’t really know what to compare it to. You can create bookmarks of your favorite sites, and they will appear on your page with a screen shot of that page. You can drag-and-drop to reorder, or put bookmarks in a new catagory (page). What I really like about Only2Clicks is that it is basically browser bookmarks, but placed as your start-page make them much more accessible. Also, the visual element makes it easier to navigate if you have many links.

On my page, I have put pages that I do not access enough to warrant being a permanent tab, but that I still access more than once a week. This includes my Google Reader Search, SeeqPod, my Technorati page, Adsense, and MozDev.

So I highly suggest you check out Only2Clicks for your internet start page. Some people argue that Netvibes or iGoogle is the only way to go, but for me, I use Greader for my feeds, I only check the weather when I need to, and I don’t care about the million neat gadgets I could fit on my page.

I posted back in march about a new service called GadgetTrak which offered to increase the chances of recovering a stolen gadget. It seemed like a nifty idea for $12/year, and not wanting to disappointed, I signed up. I downloaded the agent files, tweaked them a bit to make them more believable to a thief, and then loaded them on my iPod. I had 5 licenses, so I sold a couple to my friends and loaded it onto their ipods.

Sure enough, I get a phone call one day from a friend who has GadgetTrak saying that his ipod was stolen, and he wondered if I could turn on “that tracker thing”. I activated tracking, but we didn’t receive any info for almost three weeks. When we had almost lost hope, I got a little email in my inbox stating that the ipod had been plugged into a couple at [ip address] onto a computer called ****** family.

We contacted GadgetTrak and they sent us all the information we needed to recover the ipod. Luckily it was not necessary to go to the police and their ISP to find out who it was. My friend recognized the **** family (name changed to protect the guilty) as a fellow student who goes to his high school.

So I gathered and sent him all the logs, notification emails, and other information I had proving the ipod was his. Luckily we had entered his serial number into GadgetTrak (probably wouldn’t have recorded it otherwise) and we were able to use that to prove the ipod’s rightful owner.

Looking back, I think the kid probably heard my friend boasting about his tracking software, so he only used wall chargers. After a month though, he probably thought it was safe, and let it slip. So if you have a gadget that needs protecting, I highly recommend you buy GadgetTrak. The price has gone up from $12 to $20, but it is still an amazing deal (Especially if you lose things often). You get five licenses and stickers, which should be enough to cover your camera, phone, music player, USB drive, and whatever else you have.

If you buy a license, be sure to check out my post on how to tweak the agent files to make it more believable to a thief (right text to put, real ipod icon, etc).

Erin posted a good point over at Unclutterer about getting rid of your paper news subscription, and converting to online subscriptions. I think this is a superb ideas, and I have made my opinion clear about paper vs. Digital in my post Going Paperless with PDF.

Personally, I don’t read newspapers. I don’t care about keeping up with the latest political scandals or the latest horrific murders and all that other media stuff. I get my news from online news sites such as Reuters, and sometimes even Digg. In fact, when most people are sitting down with their coffee and newspaper, I’ll be eating breakfast, flipping through my Google Reader feeds with one hand.

However if you are in love with a brand-name newspaper publication, or you are not tech-savvy enough to move to RSS, then at least consider a digital subscription. No more piles of old newspaper in your garage, no more pages of useless classifieds that you are not interested in, and no more paperboys throwing your paper into your bush constantly.

Online newspaper subscriptions. They may have been here for years now, but they may still be the future of broad publication (vs. personal publication such as selecting and subscribing to individual feeds.).

What do you think?

I read Mark’s post about Two Task Lists over at Productivity501, and I wanted to add my thoughts.

As much as some people want to pile all their tasks in one single list (including me sometimes), I have found that this just isn’t the best way to go about it. We all have daily or weekly recurring “habit” type tasks, which are hard to classify on our todo list. Even though emailing [insert name here] might seem more urgent than exercising, exercising is a part of your life. These types of tasks simply don’t mix well in a single list, and can mix all your priorities up quickly.

After looking at the different types of tasks, I believe there are two effective catagories for tasks, “Todo” and “Habit”. Todo would be full of spontaneous tasks that arise, as well as yearly or monthly recurring tasks such as bill paying or income tax. This list is mostly limited to tasks that are not particularly enjoyable, but are things that need to get done.

The second list would be the Habit list, which would include mostly daily or weekly recurring tasks. Unlike the first list, items on your habit list are things that are either enjoyable, responsibilities, or things you want to do (like stretch in the moning, write blog post, exercise).

For me, putting something like exercise on my todo list puts me in a completely wrong mindset. Daily exercise isn’t a chore, or something I just want to get out of the way. I choose to do it, because I enjoy it, and I enjoy the benefits of it. I really think this ties in with my last post about writing too much stuff down. If you start putting enjoyable items like exercise or eat healthy on your todo list, what are you do when you finish your todo list? What if you put your entire life on a list, and rush to complete it? That’s Easy!” you say. You would feel relieved after you finish your todo list, because now you are free to enjoy the living part of your day, such as exerci- wait.. didn’t you already rush through that?

Currently, I use Joe’s Goals as my daily habit tracker. Anything that is easy to forget to do like exercising, writing a blog post, or completing three MITs, I put in my goals tracker. Almost everything on my habits list I enjoy doing, and nothing feels like a chore. They are all habits that I am trying to work into my daily life. I just can’t see the benefit of mixing these into my regular list along with “go get computer fixed” or “order Ikea furniture”.

So I guess you can see that I am pretty satisfied with my current system. What is yours, and are you satisfied?

I discovered Firefox as an alternative browser sometime last year, and I have loved it from day one (you may be able to tell that from the number of Firefox-related posts on Gearfire).

What I like most about it is the user’s ability to customize their experience. From day one I liked how I could move my address bar into the menu bar, and merge my google toolbar with the navigation buttons. The result is much more screen space, and an easier to use interface. Here are a couple extensions that we found to further customize and reduce clutter on Firefox’s interface.

Menu Editor - this is a great extension to help you get rid of those junky functions in your menus. If you take close look, you will find various buttons that you do not use at all, such as “Web search” or “Save Frame as…”. Menu Editor also lets you change what displays on the right click menu, and the tab menu. Oh, and if you REALLY want to trim it down, you can move buttons/functions from menu to menu (you might be able to condense everything you need into 2 menus, instead of 7). Now thats what I call trimming off the fat! Get menu editor here.

Organize Status Bar - The status bar is the bar at the bottom of your firefox window that shows the page loading bar, and various small icons for security. What starts as an innocent small bar at the bottom of your page can soon spiral out of control when you start installing extensions such as Greasemonkey or Adblock which put their own buttons into the status bar. Organize Status Bar allows you to remove buttons you don’t want, and re-arrange the ones you do. Very useful extension. Get it here.

Faviconize Tab - it is easy to get carried away with opening tabs in Firefox, and before you know it you have too many to effectively sort through. If you are like me, you have 3-4 websites that you have open constantly, but take up too much room. Faviconize Tabs lets you shrink the tab to roughly 1/6 of the original size. Now I don’t worry about keeping my essential apps open, but I can still distinguish them by their favicons! Get Faviconize Tab here.

Smart bookmarks bar - secondary websites such as Adsense and Gearfire statistics find their place in my bookmarks tool bar. I never used the tool bar up until a couple weeks ago, when I set it up in an effort to reduce the number of constantly open tabs. If you want to fit more than 8 links on your bar at once, you can use this nifty extension to shrink the whole bookmark down to the size of its favicon, similar to Faviconize Tab. Get it here.

Hide tab bar - allows you to set a shortcut key that hides your tab toolbar. Useful for when you want to temporarily get your tab clutter out of sight, when you don’t want other people to see your inactive tabs, or when you have a large flash animation or picture that requires the extra half inch of screen space. Get Hide Tab Bar here.

UI Tweaker - possibly the holy grail of anti-clutter firefox extensions, UI Tweaker allows you to perform over 50 different tweaks to your browser to help save space. Most notably however, is the tweak that combines your refresh and stop buttons into a single button that changes. (You don’t need to stop pages that are already loaded, and you rarely have to refresh yet to be loaded pages..) Get UI Tweaker here.

Any specific extensions you use that have improved your overall FF experience? Drop us a comment and let us know.